Albert writes about self esteem and three stages of cultivating compassion towards yourself. When you consider the concept that “depression is anger turned inward”, cultivating compassion becomes a critical component of healing the self. For Albert,

“When I found out I was a Highly Sensitive Person – reading the psychological research on the character and biological trait – I cannot describe how healing it was to my self-esteem. Understanding and realising there was nothing wrong with me – it was just a character trait, one the world had shunned.”

I’m also a sensitive person, although I’ve found that with practice, I’ve developed some protective callouses around my sensitive muscle. I’m now better at letting other people’s emotional baggage bounce off me instead of internalizing it. On the other hand, I can get highly stressed and high-strung, and that’s something I’ve learned to accept and work with instead of trying to “fix”.

Andrew writes about shortcut to happiness and two ways to find and maintain happiness: choosing happiness and maintaining happiness as an ongoing process. I was just speaking with a colleague today about a lecture I’ll be delivering in April on figuring out what we want to do with our lives. My colleague said that it’s important to do what makes us happy, and I agreed with the caveat that many of us haven’t figured out what “happy” means for us personally. If you don’t define “happiness” for yourself, you may not recognize it even if you tripped over it. Andrew writes:

Remember there are no shortcuts to happiness. You have to take some alone time and start writing what it is in your life right now that makes you unhappy. Make a big list, and then prioritize all the issues you come up with.

(Let me throw a wrench in this one: if the law of attraction asserts that what we focus on, expands, then would making a big “unhappy” list keep these unhappy things in our consciousness, even if it is meant to help us rid of these unhappy things?)

Rena believes that she is a poster child for Prozac, after being put on medication and light therapy following a failed suicide attempt:

So, to make a long blog post short, I used affirmations, Prozac and the love of a good dog and great family to dump the abusive guy, go back to America and start my own freelance writing business. I look forward to getting out of bed now.

What I found interesting was that in the same blog, by a different author, was a short article on “treating depression with minimum medication” and focusing on managing the environment stressors in the person’s life.

Walter is “a PhD-trained biochemist working in genomics and cancer biology who’s interested in understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms that control health and disease.” He sent an interesting article on the genetics of panic disorder by citing studies looking at the blood cells of people with- and without panic disorder. Walter’s article is written at a level that not everyone may understand, even though most of the concepts on there should have been covered in high school biology - for example, “phenotype, lymphocyte, gene expression, functional cluster analysis”. (I read somewhere that we should be writing at an 8th grade level.)

It’s also important to note that the study cited uses a very small sample size - less than 20 patients in each study group (or “study arm” as clinical trial researchers call them). This was not listed among the problematic factors of a study looking at genes that may be different in people who experience panic disorder, but I think the small sample size is a big problem especially when the study was then used to create a predictive test. The potential consequence is causing people to panic about possibly having a panic disorder and maybe even receiving unnecessary or inappropriate treatment for their (mis)-diagnosis.

Thank you for submitting your best blog articles and personal stories on depression, bipolar disorder, and mental health to my blog carnival. Due to the large number of submissions, I am unable to include all submissions for this edition, but personally visit and read each entry.

Until next time!
Jane